Ep65 "Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks?"

Did magicians discover tricks of the mind centuries before neuroscientists? Why can’t you see what they’re doing right in front of you? How do magicians steer your attention or appear to read your mind? Dive into the trapdoors of the human brain which allow the mind to get fooled. Join Eagleman with several guests: magician Robert Strong and cognitive neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
We're the first people to discover things about the human brain,
neuroscientists or magicians. How do magicians steer your attention? Why
can't you see what they're doing when they do something
right in front of you? And how can someone appear
to read your mind? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me

(00:27):
David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford
and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three
pound universe to understand why and how our lives look
the way they do. Today's episode dives deep into the

(00:51):
world of magic tricks. Why do magic tricks work? I'm
not talking about the mechanics of how a card trick,
or how a magician saws a box in half and
it's actually two ladies and two boxes, or how a
magician pulls off a trick with mirrors. I'm not talking
about that. I want to talk about the way the

(01:12):
human brain works and how that opens the door to
us getting fooled. And so I'm going to start with
an assertion if brains worked in a totally different way,
presumably we would have different sorts of magic tricks. Other
things would work for us. So, for example, if we

(01:34):
ever discover life on other planets, we might find that
the aliens visual systems or attentional systems work differently, and
therefore an alien magician stands on stage in front of
its alien audience and does things that would seem patently
obvious to us, and all the aliens would put their

(01:57):
green hands over their mouths and gasp, wow, how did
she do that? In other words, if they have some
sort of flaw in their understanding of the reality of
the world out there, then their magicians could take advantage
of that and they would be flummixed. So in today's episode,
we're gonna take the opposite view. We're going to pretend

(02:18):
we're the aliens looking at the humans, and we'll get
to see the flaws in the human brain that way
that cause us to misperceive reality, which gives rise to
a class of people known as magicians, who exploit these
neural deficits, either for profit or entertainment. And what's fascinating

(02:41):
is that even though we've figured out a lot about
the brain, there's a sense in which neuroscientists are always
playing catch up to those people who have mastered the
art of perception. This can be the stage magician or
the mentalist, or the person running a seance, or the
guy run the shell game on a street corner, or

(03:02):
the professional pickpocket. These people have mastered manipulation through a
lot of trial and error. And now we're at a
fascinating point where there's a collaboration going on between these
two fields, where neuroscientists try to figure out the science
of what magicians already figured out works. In other words,

(03:26):
neuroscience is following the scent trails of the magicians to
figure out what makes these tricks and sleight of hand
and illusions full our neural networks. Now, if you've been
listening to this podcast, you'll know that the brain lives
in silence and darkness, and it's always trying to construct

(03:47):
an internal model of the outside world. The critical point
for today is that there is not a perfect mapping
from the outside to the inside. In other words, it's
not as though something happens in the outside world and
we have a perfect record of that on the inside. Instead,

(04:07):
if something happens outside the spotlight of where you're paying attention,
you just don't see it at all. But the brain's
job is to put together a story of what the
heck is happening in the world out there, and so
it will do so even if it has missed that event,
even if its story is totally wrong. Its job is

(04:28):
to narrate what is going on in the world given
its best understanding. So that means if you don't see
some sleight of hand, your brain will nonetheless cook up
a story like the coin must have disappeared into thin
air and then it later appeared in my pocket. Now
let's say those aliens don't have an attentional spotlight like

(04:52):
we do, so they can see everything happening in the scene.
They would be totally amused that you fell for that.
To them, you're like a dog falling for a simple trick,
like when you pretend to throw a ball and you
hide it behind your back and the dog gets fooled.
So today we're going to explore the science behind the magic,

(05:12):
and we're going to get there with the help of
two interviews. First, we're going to talk with a magician
and then with two neuroscientists who study why magic works.
So first I called up my friend Robert Strong, a
professional magician, and asked him about his experience with manipulating attention.

(05:37):
So Robert tell us about what magicians need to understand
about the brain in order to do what you do.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
So magicians have spent five thousand years abe testing tricks
on humans to find the moments where the attention, where
the gaze is upon you, but the attention is not
on you, so that the eyes may see them, but
the brain doesn't record it. And what we do is
we pay really close attention to people for those moments

(06:06):
where the attention is somewhere else. And sometimes it happens naturally,
but mostly we manufacture it where the attention is internal.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
What's an example of how you would manufacture where someone's
attention is.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
So the three that I use the most. The first
is where I'm interested, is where they're interested. So I
show no interest in the method or the secret, but
I bring all my folks and attention and my gaze
to where the secret isn't that's the classical misdirection.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
So can you unpack that with an example?

Speaker 2 (06:40):
So if I were to hold up a dollar bill
and I bring my attention and focus to the dollar bill,
that's where I want them to be. But if I
want to sneak something into the dollar bill, if I'm
going to fold a bill around like a coin or
something to make a prop that I'm going to use later.
What I'll do is I'll show it intron in the subject.

(07:01):
So where are you from? Have you ever done a
magic trick before? Is this your first time being magical?
And so I take my focus intention interest over there.
The other thing I could do is I might have
a red herring for this. I need a pen or pencil.
Do you have one? Let's look. While they're looking, I'm
putting the coin in the door, right in.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
Front of them.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Their eyes could record it, but it just doesn't no pen,
That's okay. I'll use the bill as a magic wand
so it's a red herring.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
And did you say there were three ways you do it?

Speaker 2 (07:31):
There's probably a dozen, but there's three that I use
the most. The one that I focus on probably the
most is humor. Just a little joke. And when you
give a little joke, they laugh for just a moment.
Their gaze is on you, but they don't record what
they're seeing. So if they were actually watching a video
of it, they can rewind it, slow it down, and
they can see me do the secret move. They didn't move,

(07:53):
but in real time, they just don't record it, okay,
And what's the third The third one that I use
the most is either the trick is over or I
apparently fail. So if you chose the King of Hearts
and I pull out the Two of Hearts, you go, Nope,
that's not it. I go, oh, that just didn't work.

(08:13):
I dropped my shoulders, I bring my gaze and attention,
like darn, that didn't work. And when they go, oh,
the trick's over or he failed, then I could do
the secret move right in front of them and the
brain doesn't record it. I go, We'll give me one
more chance, or tell me what your card is, and
then their card is in a magical place like inside
a box they've been holding the whole time. A lot

(08:33):
of magicians that do really good sleide of hand do
a lot of overwhelming them with cues. Can you hold
that a little lower? Can you bring that a little
bit closer? Can you make sure everybody can see?

Speaker 3 (08:47):
You know?

Speaker 2 (08:47):
And just giving them a set of cues one after another,
they stop recording the secret move that's right in front
of them because they don't want to get it wrong.
So if you are an assistant on stage in front
of two people or ten thousand people, and I give
you a set of instructions, and I just hit you
with three or four instructions, especially if number one slightly

(09:10):
contradicts number four. All of a sudden, you're looking right
at me, but you're not recording the secret move. So
if I say, can you hold that a little bit lower?
Can you hold a little bit closer, no closer to
your body a little higher?

Speaker 3 (09:22):
Please?

Speaker 2 (09:23):
And now they're thinking that was he said lower to
a Hi. I don't want to get that wrong, And
they're trying to split the difference. They're looking right at you,
but the brain doesn't record a secret move that happens
right in front of them. Another great one is what
you do use is called bottom up. Something that just
comes from nowhere. So a piece of flash paper, a

(09:44):
flash of light, a sound on a sudden movement, an
assistant comes on stage, something shiny and bright that just distracts,
like the cartoon squirrel. You give them something that just
takes their gaze off for just a moment, and that
gives you enough time to sneak an elephant to the room.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Oh excellent. Yeah. In neuroscience we talk about exogenous and
endogenous attention, meaning you know, exogerous attention is something happens
the snap, debang, the flash, and it causes you to look.
It grabs your attention over there, whereas endogenous attention is
where I'm choosing to put my attention or where I
think I'm choosing to put it. And that's all the

(10:21):
first things you mentioned. We're taking people's in dodgenous attention,
but the sudden effect is what grabs their attention. Then
you can do lots of things right under their nose.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
The terms the magicians use are bottom up top down.
So if I'm holding a lighter and a piece of
flash paper. For a bottom up, I light the flash paper,
it makes a big flash in the air of all
the eyes and gaze goes up while they handholding the
lighter dumps it into a secret pocket, brings him back
to the previous position, and when the eyes come down,
the letter is now apparently vanished. But for top down,

(10:55):
I might say watch this piece of paper closely, bring
your gaze in close, watch really closely, and when they're
following the instructions, probably by force perspective, I can toss
that piece of paper over their head. Outside of their view,
all they see is the back of my hand. And
when I come back down, apparently holding the paper and
balling up into my other hand, the volunteer sees the

(11:19):
ball in their mind. When I say sees that, they
see their mind's eye go into the hand. And because
I am directing them and keeping them really focused in
my place, they're not seeing the places I don't want
them to see. And then I can apparently make it
vanish and had already been gone for a few seconds.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
Tell us about other types of misdirection that you exploit.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
One very powerful type of misdirection that I use all
the time is something called time misdirection. I'm not a neuroscientist,
but my understanding is that the brain has really good
instant recall. So in my being out there in the
field and doing magic tricks for people, if I do
the secret move and then the reveal immediately after that,
the brain is really good at rewinding a set or

(12:00):
two and going, something just happened, and I know that's
when the magic happened. Maybe I don't understand what the
secret move was. So magicians try to create a lot
of time distance between a secret move and the reveal
of the magic trick where the magical moment happens. So
a really good example of time as direction is a
magic trick that every magician learns at the beginning of

(12:22):
their career, and it's in every kid's book. It's forcing
a playing card, giving the illusion of a free choice.
So if I show I've got a deck of cards
where the cards are all different, and I peek at
the bottom card and I secretly know that it is
the Queen of Hearts, I ask you to cut the
cards into two piles. So you take the top half
and place it on the table, and I take the

(12:42):
bottom half and I criss crossed it across the top
of the cards.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
Like, so, now I talk to you, I say you
had a free choice. There's fifty two cards.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
It would be a small miracle if I can tell
you that you cut to the Queen of Hearts before
you look at the card you cut to. I just
want to make sure you know that I didn't even
touch the car cards. And then I go and I
pick up the pile of the cards, and I show
you that the card that you cut to was indeed
the Queen of Hearts. It was simply the bottom card.
But enough timeness direction, the audience loses track of which

(13:12):
is the top and which is the bottom.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Excellent, So tell us how you, as a magician exploit assumptions.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
That's a great question.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
I think everything we do as we exploit assumption is
because the human brain lives in the future, is predicting
what's coming next. And if we take them down that
road of giving them all the supporting evidence that everything
they believe to be is true is true, and then
we pull back the curtain and we show them a
new reveal, something that's unexpected, that's the magical moment. So

(13:42):
we understand that people believe that if I'm holding a
rubber band and I make a very specific sound like this,
that the rubber band is now broken. And I gave
you supporting visual evidence by giving the illusion that the
rubber band's broken. But the rubber band never broke. All
I did was pluck it like a musical instrument at

(14:05):
the right time. The eyes could see that I didn't
break it. But because you hear the sound, the brain goes, oh,
that's super familiar. I know that sound. And then they
see what looks like a broken rubber band. They jumped
to the wrong conclusion for the right reasons. Oh, for
the audience that's listening. Here's what I did was I
took a rubber band and I put my index fingers

(14:25):
and I'm making a long oval.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
And I took that long oval, and I.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
Collapsed the top band down to the bottom band to
make the two lines, so it looks like a single band.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
And I stretched it out and made a new circle.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
And now to complete the circle, I took my finger
out of the oval, and now I've got this little
nub here I can pluck, and it looks like a
new circle or a new rubber band, but in reality,
it's a stretched out rubber band. And that plucking sound
completes the illusion in the brain that the rubber band
is broken. And then all I have to do is
open up the oval and show that it was never

(14:57):
actually broken, or that it's magically restored.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
So for the audio audience, it looks like Robert breaks
a rubber band. It looks like he's got a single
stretch of rubber and he pulls it and you hear
the sound and you think, oh, I see he has
just snapped the rubber band. And then a moment later
he shows you bunk. Here is the complete rubber band again.
But Robert, you're saying a big part of that is

(15:22):
the sound of seeing it and the assumption of what
that translates to.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
So that specifically as sound synchronization. But we do give
an all magic supporting evidence of the illusion, so that
way all thoughts of hey, there's something funny going on
or this isn't real goes away and you believe in
the reality that we're creating terrific.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah, all of us, of course live in our own head.
We've got our internal models running. We interpret reality, and
your job as a magician is simply to navigate what
we think is the reality going on. I know you
think about forced perspectives like this to tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
So a lot of times magicians just simply understand your
point of view literally. So we'll practice in front of
a mirror or a camera, and if we get the
angles right, we can create allusion that something appears, disappears,
or even levitates. And this is one that's pretty easy
to explain. But from your point of view, you see

(16:26):
a silver ball that is apparently floating, Yes, But from
another point of view or another angle, when I turn
the sideway, so you can see it's a silver soup ladle,
and you were just seeing the bowl of it and
weren't seeing the handle, and the handle was simply under
my armpit, which creates a beautiful illusion in the kitchen
at soup time.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
Okay, So just for the audio audience, he put the
soup ladle under his arm so the bottom of it
is sticking out towards us, and it looks like a
floating silver ball. And then he takes his hands off
of the silver ball and it makes it look like
he's levitating it with his hands. It's so simple and
so good and so compelling. Check out the video if

(17:08):
you're just listening to this on audio. Okay, So that's
an example of forced perspective, as in, you know exactly
where I am in the case of zoom COVID pandemic.
Must have been cool for you in certain ways because
you got to do all kinds of zoom magic tricks
where you know precisely what the perspective is. But when
you're doing this in an audience and live audience with

(17:29):
lots of people, what kind of things can you do
there in person?

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Combining everything we've talked about, you can create a series
of illusions that happen back to back to back to back.
So it's just bombarded with magic. Because one of the
things I like to create is just a bombardment of
magic all coming out to your senses, all wines and together.
It's a cumulative effect and it feels super magical.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
That's great. And people, even if they're sniffing out some
particular part of it, you're hitting them with lots of
different things, and so they're not going to pick up
on what's going on.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, and they focus on the one that fools them.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yeah, that's right. So Robert, how do you make sure
that you understand what it is like to be in
the audience's shoes looking at you.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
So magicians have to have a lot of empathy. We're
creating moments of delight and joy for other people, so
we have to literally see it from their perspective, like
physically for the magic to work.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
But we also have to know.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
What's their life experience and what's their expectations, what's their assumptions,
and kind of put ourselves in their shoes to create
moments of joy. And I was wanting to asked, what
is the best magic trick. My answer was the ham
sandwich heading. Gnulms, a Baltimore magician I think in the fifties,
wrote a book and it's just a little paragraph in there.

(18:48):
And the way it explains how you get to the
best magic trick in the world is if you and
I were walking down the street and you said, do
a magic trick, and I reached the right packet, I
pull out a ham sandwich.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
You like, that's weird.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
But if it were lunchtimer walking down the street and
you say do magic trick and I pull out ham sandwich,
You're like, well, that's convenient timing. But if you had
just explained to me a ham sandwich that you had
been thinking about all day long, it was from your childhood,
you could even get it here. And then you say
do a magic trick and I pull up that ham sandwich.
It's a freaking miracle. So when I say magicians have empathy,

(19:25):
they really good magicians really take the time to think
about where are they physically? Who are they? Are they engineers?
Are they scientists? What's going on? Do they just get funding,
do they just get FDA approval?

Speaker 3 (19:39):
What's the space they're in there?

Speaker 2 (19:40):
There's a fountain there, and there's or they're on a
ship in the bay or something like that, and then
you take the lot all together and you create an
illusion that is a freaking experience that they'll remember for
the rest of their lives.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
That was Robert Strong, a professional magician. It's wonderful to
watch his performances, and I'm linking some of his videos
in the show notes. And next I called up two
colleagues of mine, Stephen Macknick and Susannah Martinez Conde. They're
both neuroscience professors and researchers at State University of New
York Downtown Medical Center. They've been studying the intersection of

(20:32):
magic with neuroscience for years, so I wanted to dive
in with them. So you've asserted that magicians have been
testing and exploiting the limits of attention and cognition for
hundreds of years, and neurosciences just beginning to catch up

(20:52):
with that. So tell us about that.

Speaker 4 (20:54):
We have been studying the neuroscience of magic for I
guess about the almost twenty years now, and something that
we realize early on is that as neuroscientists, we have
sometimes been reinventing the wheel and arrive into conclusions and
finding things about the mind and the brain that the

(21:16):
magicians know for centuries, if not longer. So I have
an example causes such as change blindness and in attentional blindness.
These are cognitive neuroscience concepts that basically refer to the
way that our brain prioritizes attention. So change blindness refers

(21:37):
to when something changes but you don't realize, you don't
notice the change because you have not been paying attention,
sometimes during a gamma change, and we have continuity errors
in movies and that sort of situation. And in attentional
blindness simply refers to the fact that we cannot attend

(21:58):
to a million things at once. We can, in fact,
to attend to one thing at once, and so whatever
you're not attending to, you are going to ignore. And
you could say that you're blind to those events you're
not attended.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
To, and so magicians take advantage of this.

Speaker 5 (22:13):
What Susanna was saying with inattentional blindness has to do
with when we are paying attention to something, we are
not able to pay attention to other things. And this
implies both a time that we're paying attention but also
a space that we're paying attention. So attention also has
a spatial component. So that is something that magicians learned

(22:36):
a long time ago, that there was a spotlight of attention.
And this is something that neuroscientists, cognitive neuroscience also discovered
independently from magicians, and in fact, the evolution here of
both concepts is so convergent that we came across the
same terminology. Both scientists and magicians called this is spotlight

(23:00):
of attention and independently of each other. And so this
is where when you're paying attention to something, there is
actually a point in your visual system that's a relatively
small point where you're paying attention. It can be in
the center of your vision or outside the center of
your vision, and this area is where you actually can

(23:21):
perform tasks that require attention. And outside that area we
now know to some extent because of research that Susanna
and I helped conduct, that you actually suppress everything else. Okay,
so that's how the spotlight seems to be working in
the brain and what neuroscience brought to the table. But
magicians knew about the spotlight of attention from their own

(23:42):
research in performing before anybody else.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
So The magician's task is to draw your spotlight of
attention to something they want you to look at while
they're doing something else outside of that spotlight that you
can't see. So give me an example.

Speaker 4 (23:58):
Of that example is in terms of attentional management magicians,
one term is a misdirection, but it's basically attentional management.
And I'm thinking about the magic tree, the cups and balls.
This cos back to the Roman Empire. It's still performed today.

(24:19):
But when we say the magicians have known some of
these things for a long time, it's a really long time.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
Well.

Speaker 4 (24:25):
In the Cups and Balls track, you typically performed with
three upside down cups, and balls appear and disappear below
the cups, and what they do is divide your attention.
There's a minimum of three locations with the three cups, and.

Speaker 6 (24:41):
They're moving them around.

Speaker 4 (24:42):
And not only you're dividing your attention on three special occasions,
but the magicians will be talking at the same time,
tell them.

Speaker 6 (24:50):
Some sort of story.

Speaker 4 (24:51):
They call it pattern And so what that forces spectators
is to divide their attention. And so in multiple locations,
cross multiple sensory systems, and as we explained before, we
do not have the wiring to do that. We can
really only pay attention to one thing, and so magicians

(25:12):
are masters of the divide and conquered approach of attention.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
So how does the cups and balls trick work? I mean,
aside from dividing your attention, what are they actually doing there?

Speaker 5 (25:22):
So in the cups and balls, so you have three
cups and you have three or more balls, and what
they'll do is they'll show you under a cup that
there's nothing there, and then they put down the cup
and they show you another cup and there is a
ball there. And then they move the cups around and
you can follow. It's not very fast, you can see
which cup is going where. And then when they move

(25:42):
the cup around, they pull up the cup with the
ball and earth the ball's gone. And then they opened
another cup and the ball's there, and you know that
that was what was empty. And they're doing this with
slight of hand.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
So there's sleight of hand involved that we should not
really disclose because we have been sworn to secrecy by
various magic societies. But the main thing from a neuroscience
perspective is that you are dividing your attention arguably and
I do not believe the experiment has been done. But

(26:13):
one experiment I would like to do is to have
people and that track their say, their eye movements, and
have them observed just one special location at once, one
one cup, one ball. My prediction would be that they
might have a much better chance at figuring this out
just staying still with their attentional allocation than as we

(26:38):
watch the trick naturally.

Speaker 6 (26:39):
But that, of course is not what we tend to do.

Speaker 5 (26:42):
So we wrote a paper about the Cups and Balls
using Taelor the magician from Pen and Teller, and he
actually performed it on camera in multiple different ways that
we would consider to be a stimulu of different conditions
for our experimental paradigm. And then we showed subjects these

(27:06):
different videos with different conditions and we were able to
learn a few things about how the Cups and Balls
has done.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
So.

Speaker 5 (27:12):
First off, the general zeitgeist in magic is that you're
drawing people's attention by moving your hands in a certain
way and moving the cups in a certain way, and
while you're making a big move over here, they don't
notice a small move over there. That's an axiom of magic.
A big move covers a small move, and the small
move would be, of course, we're manipulating the balls, and

(27:34):
the big move would be to draw your attention. And
that can either draw your eye position as the spectator,
or it can just draw your attention without moving your eyes. Now,
Teller had a theory going into this study, and the
theory was that certain kinds of motions were more attention
grabbing than others. And in fact, he specifically thought that

(27:56):
there was one type of motion that he and pen
had actually developed and was so strong that it was
perhaps the strongest form of stimulus that would draw humans attention.
And they developed this while they were developing their famous
cups and balls trick from Pennineller. That trick is famous

(28:17):
because they actually do it and then they do it
again with transparent cups, and the transparent cups still work.
And so this was a huge shock, and it also
violates all sorts of magical rules or magical ideas, because
first off, you're not supposed to do the same trick twice.
That's another axiom in magic, because there's a chance that

(28:39):
the audience will figure out that trick.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
But cups and.

Speaker 5 (28:42):
Balls are so strong, it's so robust of a trick,
and they're so good at performing it that they actually
can do it twice in front of an audience without
any risk of the audience figuring out the trick. But secondly,
there's definitely not supposed to do it with transparent cups
because it is literally possible to see the slag of
hand in this case. It's much easier anyway to see

(29:03):
the slight of hand in this case. But it still
works because the attentional management is so strong, and he
feels one of the ways they get away with some
of their biggest moves in the cups and balls is
with this one thing that he feels was really important,
which is that if you do something where the ball drops,
that is, the gravity actually accelerates the ball at nine

(29:25):
point eight meters per second square down. That that is
perhaps the strongest thing he thought to draw a human's attention.
That there's something about things dropping in the gravity, well,
that will draw a human being's attention very strongly. And
they were able to do certain things in their act.
Again we can't talk about the details, but certain things
in their act were drawn because of dropping the ball.

(29:47):
So they would have a ball on top of the
upside down cup and he poured the ball off into
his hand and while the ball was dropping, he could
get away with magical murder. Okay, that's what his theory was.
And so we did an experiment where we actually did
a bunch of different conditions, including the ball dropping and

(30:07):
including him moving the ball with his hands and other
things to test what was the strongest draw for attention.
And what we found was that dropping the ball in
the gravity well was indeed very strong, but there was
actually something that was a little bit stronger, which he'd
never done before because it's not a very good magical technique,
but he discovered that it actually worked really well, in

(30:30):
fact stronger than pouring the ball in the graviol which
is we asked him to just pick up the ball
with his hand and put it down on the table,
which is not part of the general set of movements
that a magician would do, and that actually drew the
eyes of the audience even better and it allowed him
with his other hand to potentially do more trickery. So

(30:54):
we were really thrilled by the outcome because we discovered
something that not only advanced science did, it also advanced magic.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
That's terrific because It implies that we care about the
social aspect too, not just the physics. But our attention
is drawn by a human is doing something and I'm
going to watch that. By the way, as a side note,
I did some experiments a while ago that showed that
something that grabs attention even more than let's say a
ball dropping in gravity is when it violates the nine

(31:23):
point eight meters per second square, when it's actually dropping
faster or slower. That is a huge attention grab. I
don't know how you pull it off on stage, but
for example, one of the reasons that it's so compelling
when we watch The Matrix or the movie three hundred
is because things are speeding up and slowing down. Let's

(31:44):
say Trinity jumps up in the air and we have
very clear predictions about when she should hit the ground,
but she stays in the air longer than she's supposed to.
That sort of thing really grabs our attention.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
I wonder if a neural adaptation also plays into that,
because these kind of unexpected events sort of like keep
you on your toes, and that a fast motion followed
by slow motion, like you may imagine that your neurons
would adapt to a certain rate of motion and then
the unexpected or the change is what then drives again

(32:19):
neural firing. But there's there's nothing else that you brought
up that I wanted to comment on, and it's it's
the social aspect of magic that is so important at
so many levels, and that is one of the main
tools that magicians use. For one, humor, it's a fantastic
element of misdirection. One of the magicians that we originally

(32:43):
collaborated with, Johnny Thompson, the Great TOMSONI he died a
few years ago, but he used to say that when
the audience laughs, time stops and the magician can do anything.
And that's because emotions, priority, tie attention so powerfully related
to this, Magicians they cultivate relationships with the with the audience,

(33:07):
they're they're empathetic figures. It is in the in the
magician's favor that the audience wants the magic to work,
that they want the magician to succeed rather than trying
to prove it wrong. But that's so that's another element.
And finally I wanted to touch on the fact that
a number of magic tricks rely on bringing on stage magic.

(33:32):
They rely on bringing a volunteer on the stage, and
that is just so compelling for the audience because spectators
are identifying with the volunteers, just wondering what's.

Speaker 6 (33:44):
Going to happen.

Speaker 4 (33:45):
Imagine mirror neurons firing wildly, and while the attention is
fully allocated on the volunteer, then the magician can do
whatever they need to be doing. And what's more, sometimes
within that the magician draws an attention to something while
they're doing something else. But there is also an element

(34:06):
of time misdirection, because it is not necessarily that the
magic manipulation is happening right now while the magician is
misdirected and then maybe setting up a trick for later on,
or they may be disposing of evidence for a trick
that happened minutes ago. So things are not happening necessarily

(34:30):
in the chronology that we perceive them from the audience perspective.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
We've touched on this issue about attention, and that's something
that we study in neuroscience, but there are actually so
many things that we discover in neuro about what our
limits are, whether that's about color or about time perception
or anything like that. Give us an example of the
way that magicians operate more broadly taking advantage of these

(34:57):
cognitive limits.

Speaker 5 (34:59):
Sure, So, following up on Susanna's comments about the late
great tom Sony, so he had one trick that we
discussed in our book Slights of Mind, and it's a
visual illusion trick. And the way it worked was he
had a beautiful volunteer, which of course the idea of

(35:20):
using volunteers, or in this case, he wasn't a volunteer,
was actually an assistant. But one thing you can do
with volunteers or assistants is pick people who are interesting
looking or have an assistant whos beautiful or whatever to
draw attention of the audience to that person. And that
was the case here. She was wearing a white dress.
It left little to the imagination as it was described

(35:43):
to us. We haven't seen the trick, but it was
described to us. And so he on the stage he
would tell the audience that he could turn this dress
into a red dress. And he would say, let me
show you how I do it on the counter of three,
one two three, and then all the lights on the
stage would turn red, turning everything red, the white dress,

(36:06):
the assistant himself, and he would admit that that was
a bad joke, but he did. You have to admit
do it that he turned it into a red dress.
But now he's really going to do it and entre
it like this. At that moment, the lights would flicker
again back to white, and the dress was red under

(36:28):
white light. So what he actually did that? And this
is a spoiler alert that we have to warn people
about that we're going to spoil this trick. We had
the Great Tom Sony's permission to spoil the trick, but
we also have to put spoiler alerts whenever we do this.
But the way it would work would be to have
the bright red lights on the woman, so super bright

(36:52):
people are looking at her. He's used his voice to
direct attention to her, and this is for some period
of time, which is causing an after image to develop
in their visual system based on this brightly lit woman
against a back background. And then when the lights turn off,
there are gimmicks in the stage that a trapdoor opens

(37:14):
and her dress is pulled off. And the dress is
a special dress that's very tight, but she's got an
even tighter dress on underneath that's the same, looks the same,
but it's actually red. Okay, So the white dress is
on top of the red one. So just within a
few milliseconds, the white dress is pulled off. She has

(37:35):
a red dress on while the stage is black. But
they're everybody's seeing this positive after image that that happens.
It's called iconic memory. That happens for just a very
few brief milliseconds when you turn off the lights, you
can see a positive after image, and then the lights
come back on and you see her with real lighting,

(37:56):
with white lighting, with the dress change.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
So let me just repeat this in that during the
few milliseconds when the lights went off, in between the
red lights and the white lights, the audience is still
seeing her as though she's there because they're having an
after image. It's as though the stage hasn't gone black, right.

Speaker 5 (38:14):
Well, they can tell something's happened, and the light flickers.
People see in their normal course of life. They might
be in the bathroom and about to leave and they
turn off the lights and they'll see that they get
an after image. But we learn to ignore these things
through life, right. But he's got the audience paying attention
intentionally at the woman at the time that this happens,

(38:36):
and so when the lights are actually off. What they
can't see is any motion or the trap door or
the dress going down through the trapdoor in just this
hundred milliseconds or so that actually happens. They can't see
it because there is no light on that time, and
then the lights come back on and she's still standing there,
and it reduces the chances that they're going to see anything.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
Okay, so he's taking advantage of a visual illusion here.
So tell us about the difference between visual illusions and
cognitive illusions.

Speaker 6 (39:05):
But we should start with defining what an illusion is.

Speaker 4 (39:08):
An illusion is a perception that doesn't match reality, and
we talk about visual or conit evlusions happen in the
brain as opposed to optical illusions that have to do
with the physical property supplied.

Speaker 6 (39:23):
Right, So, if we take a glass.

Speaker 4 (39:25):
Of water and we put a pencil inside and it
appears to ban, that's an optical illusion. It has to
do with the refraction indexes of air and water. It
doesn't happen in the brain per se. But visual illusions
and cognitive evlutions are constructed in the brain, and the

(39:45):
difference really has to do with a water level. They
take place in the hierarchy of information processing, so a
visual illusion would be primarily a sensory illusion. We can
also talk about there are attack delusions, auditory illusions, and
so on. They happen close to the input. In fact,

(40:06):
some of these visual illusions we can largely explain at
the level of the retina instide of the eyeball, whereas
a coality evlution happens higher up in the brain. And
then we're talking about what we call cognitive processes, such
as attention and memory and decision making. Magicians are going
to rely much more often in cognitive evlutions attention and

(40:30):
to a lesser extent, memory and decision making.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
So give us an example of a cognitive ilution, well, a.

Speaker 6 (40:37):
Cognitive elution that happens in magic.

Speaker 4 (40:39):
Well, we have already talked about failing to perceive sleight
of hand techniques and so forth, due to not paying
attention to that place at a time, or due to
having your attention divided. One of the great magicians and
magic theorists is a Juan Tabarith from Spain, and that

(41:02):
he famously conducts a magic tricking which he vanishes a coin,
and that he has pumped the coin, he has it
grabbed in the pomp on his hand. But at some
point he makes a gesture to the audience. He says,
wait a second, and that he actually he's showing them
the coin. But because he's so masterful that manipulating attention,

(41:24):
the image of that coin is getting into their readiness,
but they do not see the coin because he's manipulating
their attention so well.

Speaker 6 (41:32):
So he really pushes.

Speaker 4 (41:34):
The boundaries and challenges just how much can I get
away with in terms of showing the audience exactly what
I'm doing without them noticing because they're not paying attention.

Speaker 5 (41:48):
We talked about how attention, which is a cognitive illusion,
can happen where you pay attention to the wrong place.
One of the ways to do that, the most common way,
perhaps is to get you to look in the wrong
place with the center of your eyes, so you're looking
over here while they're doing something over here, and in
the perfe of your vision you can't see very well anyway.
So that is one way to misdirect attention. We call

(42:11):
that overt misdirection. Now, with covert misdirection, it's much more
interesting and Wantemoteth is a master of it, and one
of the things he's been able to do is he'll
do something with his hands. I can't do it because
my hands would be off camera here, but say, down
near his waist, he'll have you looking at something he's
doing in his hands, and he'll look at it while
he does it. And because of his gaze position, that

(42:35):
audience learns through normal human and interactions to look where
your interlocutors looking. So he is really well aware of this.
So if he looks down at his hands, you guys
are trying to pay attention and I know what's in
my hands now, even though it's off camera here. But
then what he'll do is, while he's doing it, he'll
look up at you and then look back down. And
when he looks up at you, you sense that he's

(42:55):
looking up at you, so you look back at his eyes.
And while you're doing that, even before you've moved your eyes,
you'll move your attentional spotlight to see is he looking
at me right? So you haven't even moved your eyes.
He's moved his eyes up, got you to pay attention
to his eyes while he does his magic trick. While
you're you're still looking at his hands with the center

(43:16):
of your vision. But he's got you to pay attention
to his eyes and then he looks back down before
you would move your eyes, and it's this really uncanny
feeling that he did something huge right at the center
of your gaze and you're certain of it, and still
this magical effect happens. It's very powerful feeling of magical

(43:37):
wonderment when that happens.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
He must have to time that really carefully, exactly when
to look up and then when to do the sleight
of hand. How do magicians get good at doing this?
How do they get the feedback from the audience about
you know when they're timing this right.

Speaker 4 (43:53):
Well, generally magicians they they start with sleight of hand
techniques and then they add the misdirection layer on top
of having mastered slide of hands. When we actually started
studying magic, and that we did learn magic for a year,
and that we perform magic in front of a judge

(44:16):
panel to gain entry to the Magic Castle in Hollywood,
and that we barely made it, but we made it.
So we are magician members. But the magicians that we
our various magician mentors at the time, they were telling
us that the way that we were going into magic
ourselves was very unusual because we already knew a lot

(44:39):
of the without calling it misdirections.

Speaker 6 (44:42):
Early, but we knew a lot of the.

Speaker 4 (44:44):
Misdirection principles right from a cognitive science perspective. We knew
a lot about attention. We knew a lot about memory.
For magicians that generally comes much later.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
So this is a good segue. Why do you, as
neuroscientists study magic.

Speaker 5 (45:14):
We feel as neuroscientists that one of the very best
ways to find out what the brain is actually doing
is to study illusions, and so we had trained in
studying illusions I did as part of my thesis. Susanna
and I both studied illusions as postdocs in David Hewbles

(45:36):
Live at Harvard Medical School, and we knew that the
reason studying visual illusions was really important was that it's
where the physical reality doesn't match perception, and so we
can study perception in a very pure sense by studying
the neurons that are responding to the illusory effect, but

(45:56):
not the physical reality. But if you really want to
understand the underpinnings of perception itself, we realized we really
had to use illusions because it's where we could study
perception in a very pure sense where the physical reality
was not a confounding factor. Now in doing this, we
started the illusion contest because we realized that it would

(46:19):
be fun and it would bring in the public into
the world of vision research. If we had an annual
illusion contest where scientists and later on graphic artists and
people from all around the world various backgrounds could submit
what they've noticed in the world that is illusory, and

(46:40):
the whole world would be able to vote on these things.

Speaker 3 (46:44):
Well.

Speaker 5 (46:44):
Shortly after doing this, we were asked by the Association
for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. They asked us to
run one of their meetings in Las Vegas, and I
think they were hoping we were going to do the
illusion contest there, But Susanna and I decided that instead
of doing the illusion contest, we were going to do
something different that's more related to consciousness itself. When we

(47:07):
did this conference on the Consciousness in Las Vegas, we
were driving up and down the strip doing our administrative
duties and booking hotels and booking restaurants and all of this,
and we're trying to think what could we do to
bring the public in that isn't just the illusion contest. Again,
we already have that going on for the vision community,

(47:28):
and we realized that we're passing by these hundred foot
signs of Pennant Teller and other magicians on these hotels,
and that they magicians were the artists of attention and awareness.
And this was a huge epiphany for us. We realized
that they are the ones who create not only interesting
related cognitive allusions to science, but they create the best

(47:53):
illusions that science could benefit from stealing their techniques and
learning and poaching what they do in the stage and
bringing into the lab with the hope that we would
actually increase the rate of discovery in science by increasing
the quality and the robustness of the illusions. And we
also discovered when we did this. We started talking to

(48:16):
our friends in the consciouence community, and one of them
was the late Great Daniel Dennett, and he knew a
lot of magicians because he was part of a group
of people who were part of this new atheism movement.
And we're doing a lot of podcasts and doing a
lot of different shows to talk about aseism, and these

(48:36):
groups were generally scientists and philosophers and magicians and magicians
would talk about in these groups how magic was being
used to trick people in religious ceremonies to think that
actual miracles were happening. And in fact, one possibility in
the history of magic is that that's how magic actually started,

(48:58):
was as a religious ceremonyal behavior to invent miracles. When
we started meeting with these magicians, because Dennett knew them,
started calling the for example, James Randy, the Amazing Randy.
Randy got us hooked up with Penn and Teller, Apollo, Robbins,
all these different magicians, the great Tom Sony and we

(49:19):
started having meetings in Las Vegas to talk about a
collaboration between magic and science, and that became a symposium
that we had at our conference that introduced the idea
of neuromagic, the idea that we can actually take magic
tricks and study them in neuroscience. And it was during
these meetings that something very important happened. We realized that

(49:44):
magicians didn't just have great tricks, but they actually had
theories about the magic. Okay, they had theories about why
they worked in the mind. And what we discovered as
scientists was more than half of these ideas were just
completely wrong. They were just you know, flat out Nope,
we'd already rolled those things out in cognitive science. Some

(50:05):
of those theories, like for example, the spotlight of attention
were actually correct, So there was convergent evolution between magic
and science, which is really interesting to us. But the
most important thing was that some of those theories we
didn't know if they were correct or not scientifically, and
they had plausible ideas in magic that very well might

(50:28):
be right. And this could really cut decades off the
science of cognitive neuroscience because we could potentially have the
illusions that magic brought to us, but not only the illusions,
but the theories kind of handed to us on a
silver platter that we could now just go test in
a scientific method fashion.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
And what do you see as the future of magic
and how does that intersect with neuroscience.

Speaker 4 (50:52):
I think that we can basically benefit from each other.
I believe that art is whether we're talking about painters
or magicians or musicians, say they do a bit of
research in the informal sense through see what works, see
what doesn't. If every performance is a bit of an experiment,

(51:16):
but it's not systematized. And so, as Steve expressed, there
are volumes like literal libraries of magic theory in which
these theories have never been put to the test, they
have never been systematically investigated in a laboratory.

Speaker 6 (51:34):
So what I think that science.

Speaker 4 (51:36):
Can really contribute to magic is in the realm of
magic theory helping magicians understand why tricks.

Speaker 6 (51:47):
Work the way they do, why misurrection.

Speaker 4 (51:49):
Happens in the way that it happens, and that then
magicians as artists can take this knowledge and then use
it in different creative ways. But I think that well
times can bring to magic and do art and do
human endeavors in general, is greater understanding.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
And I think you guys have written, if I'm remembering correctly,
about how understanding magic can also be used for let's say,
treatment and diagnosis of various cognitive disorders in neuroscience.

Speaker 5 (52:20):
Yeah, so one of the things that magic does is,
for example, with misdirection that we talked about, is manipulate attention.
So it should be possible to use these kinds of stimulation,
that is, magic tricks to manipulate attention and determine the
differences between patients who have cognitive decline that affect spatial

(52:45):
attention and patients that do not. For example, it could
become a, for example, a diagnostic and one of the
reasons we believe this is because there are magicians that
are specialized for performing for children and in the field
of it's interesting because it's similar to science. They have
annual conferences that they go to and they get up

(53:06):
and give talks to each other, and they reveal how
certain tricks work and don't work to each other in
very much similar culture that scientists do when they get
together for annual conferences and give talks to each other
about what they've discovered. And one of the things that
they do is split these rooms into different kinds of magic.
One room would be for children's magic, whereas other rooms

(53:26):
will be for adult magic. And the reason is because
children have a different attentional system, especially below the age
of five, than adults, and so certain types of magic
you're not going to work with them in the sense
that children actually have a gain of function for detecting
the trick, so they'll actually have a chance of seeing
something wrong in the trick or seeing a method that

(53:48):
adults won't because adults are much more likely to be
led down the garden path because their attentional systems are
better than children. And this is also true with people
who have different kinds into attentional deficit.

Speaker 4 (54:02):
When an Acdoral example is that, contrary to popular opinion,
magicians don't like to perform in front of drug people
because they're harder to misdirect. You really need to be
able to allocate your attention precisely to be misdirected by
the magician. Otherwise if the magician, if they cannot be
in control, that makes their life much harder. There are

(54:24):
specific magic shows that are devised for children and that
they frankly don't tend to really so much or misdirections
per se.

Speaker 6 (54:33):
They're more kind of like.

Speaker 4 (54:34):
Comedy magic small small percentage of magic compared to comedy,
and that in fact, children's magicians will often do something
that almost no magician performing for adult audiences will do,
which is to announce what they're going to be doing next,

(54:58):
and that is to the children's attention. But in a
regular magic show, audiences will be surprised and that it
works against the performance to say I'm going to make
a rabbit disappear or I'm going to make a rabbit appear.
In a show for children, the magician will more often

(55:19):
than not make that type of announcement to get the
children to stay on tusk.

Speaker 5 (55:24):
The magician Silly Billy, who we talk about in our book,
is an amazing children's magician, and he says that you
have to you have to do different kinds of tricks
that draw the attention for very short periods of time.
Like that's why with children you take a coin out
of their ear. They you know, you have to do

(55:44):
things that they know about the world. So because certain
things they don't, they won't know that it's magical, but
they just so much of what about the world is
a surprise to them anyway, you know, it has to
be something that they know is actually not true that
they don't have quarters in their ear, for example.

Speaker 4 (56:01):
And children are just sometimes not so appreciative of the
art of magic. Frankly, because when we started working with
these magicians, our oldest child was a toddler, and I
remember at some point we had them with us. He
met Apolo Robins, who's a theatrical pick pocket and he's amazing,

(56:22):
and he was getting a coin to appear and disappear
over babies, you know, ears and hands and all over
his body like he would do on stage and it
was just the most amazing magic, such a special opportunity,
and her toddler was just angry that this man had

(56:45):
given him a coin and then he took it away,
and then he couldn't know where he was, and he
was just basically not appreciating the magic whatsoever.

Speaker 6 (56:56):
He was just rage.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
This didn't mean you another question I mean wondering about,
which is can magic tricks be performed on animals? What
do you guys know about that?

Speaker 4 (57:04):
I think that it's definitely possible to trick animals, dogs,
plain FETs, and that you can go to YouTube and
that search for magic with animals, and that you'll see
all sorts of monkeys and dogs and cats being tricked
with magic in various ways. Now that is misdirection, however,

(57:26):
because I think that magic is not just being tricked.
Magic is being trigged, and then there's an element of wonder,
there's an element of art, there's an element of joy
even because something that happens with a magic trick that
is very interesting is that people most often they laugh

(57:47):
as if it's the punchline of a joke. So there's
this enjoyment something i'n expected happening magic and audiences laugh
in surprise and enjoyment.

Speaker 6 (57:59):
I don't know that.

Speaker 4 (58:02):
Other animals have this kind of experience, so I think
that that question remains open a little bit.

Speaker 1 (58:10):
I think it was Friends the Wall who pointed out
that chimps just aren't entranced with human magicians, and they
just simply don't pay attention. Do you suppose it would
work if you performed magic for chimps but you were
set up as a hologrammer in VR looking like a chimp,
would they pay more attention?

Speaker 4 (58:28):
In the case of our own human toddler, he was
very reward oriented, so he wasn't appreciating the magic in
which something was being taken away from him for no
good reason. Is the magic would have been, I don't know,
to produce toms of candy like one of these production
magic shows.

Speaker 6 (58:47):
He might have been a lot more engaged by that.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
Tell me about magic tricks that take advantage of something
about our memory.

Speaker 4 (58:56):
Yes, so we have terrible memories and magicians know that
and they take advantage of it. And in fact, something
the magician's use in many shows is what we can
call the recap, and what that does is generates a
memory illusion.

Speaker 6 (59:15):
So if you have.

Speaker 4 (59:17):
Ever been to a magic show or watch a magic
show on TV. Oftentimes the magician will do some wonderful
feit of magic, often with a volunteer, and after that
they will say, well, we didn't know each other. You
can hear you got your choice of course, and you
did this, and then this happened, and then that happened,
and I couldn't have known, and then this amazing thing happened,

(59:39):
and the description makes sense and everybody agrees, and that
the show goes on. Now here's the thing. That description
is not perfect. It deviates from reality. It doesn't deviate
from reality in a very obvious way that would make
people just figure out, okay, this is not what I saw.

(01:00:02):
There's something fishy going on, but it's not an accurate description.
So what happens then is that people go home and
they talk to their friends and that I saw this thing,
I went to this magic.

Speaker 6 (01:00:14):
Show, this happened. That happened.

Speaker 4 (01:00:17):
But the way that they're describing it now is not
the original way that they witness it. That's the magician's
recap that they're using as their description. And so it's
like now when they try to figure out how the
magician did it. It's like trying to put together apostle,
and not only you don't have all the pieces, but

(01:00:39):
you have some wrong pieces as well. So it's impossible
to reconstruct whatever happened exactly on stage. And that's why
when people come to us sometimes they and they say, well,
I saw this amazing magic trick.

Speaker 6 (01:00:54):
Can you tell me how it works?

Speaker 4 (01:00:56):
And we may say, look, we're not gonna tell you,
because one we're not supposed to, but also what you're
describing and what took place are probably very different things.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Right. I've seen this where magicians will say something like, okay, now,
as you've seen, I have not touched the deck of cards,
even though they have, And so it becomes something like
you know, eyewitness testimony in courtrooms, where you know your
memory gets overwritten with this statement that you think must
have been true even though it wasn't.

Speaker 5 (01:01:24):
So they might say something like you chose a number,
when in fact they picked a card and got the number,
which is two very different things, because if a magician's
controlling a deck of cards, they're choosing the number for
you in certain circumstances, right, And so it's not that
you picked the number, right, And so this kind of

(01:01:45):
discrepancy in the memory can specifically, you know, have you
go home and because it was a recapped to you,
you described it that you picked a number right, and
it may not gel in your memory that you actually
picked a card rather than a number.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
One.

Speaker 5 (01:02:00):
Thing that I think that scientists could study in magic
that would be of real value would be the field
of magic called mentalism. Now, in mentalism, it's largely standard
magic tricks, but instead of manipulating coins and cards and objects,

(01:02:22):
it's manipulating information. It has to do with the way
the brain actually works, and we don't know how it works.
So there are, for example, magic tricks that famously the
answer is the number thirty seven, and for some reason,
people are able much more likely than chance to pull

(01:02:45):
the number thirty seven out of their brain as an
answer to this trick. And you do this trick in
a way where you are essentially using the audience to take,
in a sense, a statistical likelihood function of what they
the whole audience is answering. And when you do this,
there's like fifty people there and ten or fifteen people

(01:03:06):
say thirty seven out of When you feel like you've
just chosen a number one out of fifty right, and
the chances should be two percent, but they're all you know,
fifteen percent of them are choosing the same number. It's remarkable.
And so this kind of thing and other things about
the way we manipulate symbols in the brain and the
way that we manipulate certain kinds of information, I think

(01:03:30):
these tricks work. It's very mysterious from a neuroscientific point
of view. It's not explained by sleight of hand in
and that understanding the neural underpinnings of this would be
a real insight into how the brain actually manipulates certain
kind of information.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
What is an illusion of choice?

Speaker 4 (01:03:49):
Well, an illusion of choice would be a situation in
which you feel that you do have a choice, when
in fact you don't. And without disclosing too much, I
think it would be fair to say that in a
magic show, very few of the choices made by a
volunteer in the audience are real choices. The magician is

(01:04:14):
typically in control of the choice, and that can be
done in a number of ways.

Speaker 6 (01:04:19):
But illusions of choice.

Speaker 4 (01:04:21):
Are yet one more type of cognitive ilution that plays
or come players from rolling magic tricks.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
That was Stephen Macknick and Susannah Martinez Conde, two neuroscience
colleagues at Sunny Downstate who study the intersection of neuroscience
and magic. So what does a stage magician have in
common with a pickpocket, or a seance director or a
street hustler. They all have curious minds that chew on

(01:04:54):
these questions of perception. How could someone misperceive this? How
can I cause a momentary pull of attention so that
I can do something right here and no one would
ever see it. People like this have for centuries been
carefully observing and exploiting human minds. So as a result,

(01:05:16):
nowadays there's a close relationship between magicians and neuroscientists, to
the degree that some magicians now collaborate with neuroscientists to
create performances that explicitly incorporate knowledge about the brain. That
means designing tricks that highlight specific pitfalls of perception or cognition,

(01:05:38):
ones that weren't known about before but have come from
the laboratory. So it's a two way street. Now increasingly
we're going to see neuroscience informed magic performances, and you
can think about exploiting this to an enormous degree. When
we think about the future of magic. For example, I
did an episode some months ago about the possibility of

(01:06:01):
mind reading by reading brain signals, and this raises questions
about the potential for magic tricks that involve a deeper
understanding or manipulation of brain signals. This could lead to
new forms of interactive and immersive magical experiences where we
find ourselves totally fooled by an internal narrative that tells

(01:06:25):
us one thing, even though something else actually happened. So
whatever direction our new technologies evolve, it seems likely that
the repertoire of magic is going to keep expanding, and
I can't wait to go to a magic show twenty
years from now, where we, like the aliens who can't
see obvious things, will find ourselves amazed, astonished, and bewildered

(01:06:52):
by the mismatch between the external world and our internal cosmos.
Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
and to find further reading. Send me an email at
podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussions, and

(01:07:13):
check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time,
I'm David eagleman, and this is inner cosmos.